Forget home automation, what about office automation

The latest wave of Internet of Things thinking has firmly pushed a mix of protocols into the spotlight.
Zigbee, Z-wave and Insteon + hubs are against wifi, bluetooth and the raspberry pi/ardunio.

USB devices make the rpi effective in bridging the gaps, and projects like the thing system put the same Web based power within easy reach. 

Cloud services begin to make things really interesting by putting storage, remote actions and more within the reach of your smart phone. This convergence is great, when you hear about it. Then you realize your house is unique, and there isn't much to automate.

I am lucky enough to be in an organization that is shifting heavily to a web based core business application; while at the same time undertaking a shift to Google Apps for business.  The combination of mature smart devices and cloud services are going to change how we communicate,  collaborate and work; for the better.

But what happens when your web team with a devops focus can be given phone systems like Asterix, or complete control over the office hardware?
Things get a little bit interesting when you realise your entire workforce ends up in a polite surveillance society - one of machines and business logic that knows when you arrive at work; potentially your comfort level; and can reroute your calls if you step away or have a meeting scheduled.

The idea of a smart printer (ala Google cloud print) that also predicts being out of paper [rather than just ink], inventory control systems that assemble your resupply orders through barcode scanning (if it works for a fridge it will work for office supplies), and just makes the office administrativia a non issue is well within reach.

One of the big revolutions of the web 2.0 era was the transition to the geoweb. The IaaS revolution is finally delivering benefits en masse; so is SaaS.

The IoT presence and sensor evolution is gaining hype; and feels as though it's approaching a point where cloud based servers can feasibly burn a large amount of compute time to work out if you want a coffee today, from your NoQ enabled store or not.

Car to Car communications

An interesting article on car to car networking.

What amazing me though is the investment apparently required:

The biggest hurdle most cities and counties will face in installing these kinds of systems is likely the financial hit. The GAO study noted that the cost of roadside V2I equipment “could range between $25,000 and $30,000 per installation.” And that figure doesn’t include the backend costs of operating and maintaining them.

I struggle to believe this, when groups of engineers can kickstart projects and hit mass production, which solve similar problems using off the shelf components at a $200 or less pricepoint.

Obviously it's a little different in terms of reliability, but you can get an ODB II plus Ardunio machine for as little as that guy is managing, how much does it really cost to swap out the radio components and beef up the processing power?

Rosewater Post Office

Why can't you open an hour earlier one day a week? No one who works in the city can possibly collect a package from you and get to work on time.
Alternatively, stay own an extra hour once a month or even open on the weekend.
When delivery companies ignore the instructions re placement of parcels and just deliver it to the nearest post office, that parcel is trapped until the owner has a half day off of work.
You need a half day because it takes a hour to get in to the city by bus, and after the peak transport windows slam shut, you have to wait about half an hour for that bus, if it deigns to arrive at all.

Starting at lunch never looks that good.

Others when faced with this problem have had packages delivered to work places - but this is not viable with bulky packages, or things where you need to wander through the city and onto a bus carrying heavy items.

So we have established the quick fix around opening hours, but what about the longer term?
Part of the problem is Web applications that don't provide delivery instruction capture.
In my view there should be a way to register a default delivery preference.
Australia Post has the trust and national reach to provide a service like this, and courier companies would undoubtedly like the idea of understanding what to do, rather than hauling the item off to the post office.

Here's how it works. The parcel delivery that fails is indicated by a card telling you where to go to get your package. On the back of it is a Qr code, and a plain text id plus link.
This token is secure, and let's you sign up. Your address its pre known.

You fill out the default instructions and agree to what ever you need to about sharing the info with third parties, and liability.

When you collect your package, the auspost agent certifies your id and the account is live.

You get annoyed at the first package, but not at the next.

Downsides - modern houses need a climate controlled secure delivery point, where authorised items can go in but other things cannot. Letter slot in the door 2.0.
This enables food delivery and other bulky items.
I am not an architect, but variations on dog doors, or a keyed deposit box seem to be a good starting point for what this could look like.

The second one is if you move house, your packages are left with the next occupant.
While this is an issue for mail, most people making purchases of a substantial nature are less likely to ask for it to be sent to the wrong place.

This seems doable. In fact, everyone who ever had their mail redirected already did the days capture part of this concept.

Roomba Experiment

It's been a while since the Roomba was brought on to the market, and the price point for a Roomba 530 is between $250-$300 - not to mention numerous competitors are now in the market place.

That tips it over the threshold for me, so I'm certainly getting one. Plus, this video kind of implies I can have my own 'ferret vs robot' gladiatorial competitions.

The other thing I was looking at this morning was home automation. You know my thoughts on killer industrial robots, but I haven't looked at home automation for a long time.

What's really quite interesting to me is that everyone I know seems to have an XBMC setup, and that zwave home automation gear is specifically target at the Australian market.
Add in LinuxMCE, the fact that everyone has an ipad, iphone or android phone; sites like IFTTT and the open source equivalents exist, people making smart devices like the Nest, and IPv6 meaning everything in the universe can have an IP address if it wants, things start to get interesting.

Right now I can:

• Use IFTTT to syndicate this blog post to twitter, facebook by adding certain labels.
• Use IFTTT to SMS/notify me ("Ensure the dog is wearing its rug") when the temperature will go below 10 degrees C, or the opposite ("You have a hot dog, it's 35 degrees C!")
• Use my galaxy s2 to add torrents to my xbmc server, while Christina watches a seperate program on the iPad.
• Pay nothing on my power bill for any of this, given the solar power being generated

The roomba will add self-cleaning to my house to some degree - only a 10-20 minute saving per weekend, but it's about the same as paying $5.77 per time I don't have to vacuum.

My lawn mower is electric, which means it performs terribly in the winter wet conditions, but I've yet to have to fight against it to make it start, and it's got trivial running costs (again, solar power).

Pretty soon, I could

• Add enough motion sensors and lighting to have climate and ambient light follow me around the house. 
• Add in dimmers for side lamps fairly cheaply ($99 is alright, but it could be better!), so when I stop moving around and settle in to watch TV the lighting fades to nothing.
• Add security sensors on the doors/windows; plus alerts to my smartphone if I leave the house and forget to close one properly.
• In winter, switch on the heater at sunrise until 9am.

Right now the biggest things I think stopping this from taking off are the lack of "starter kits". For instance, a USB stick, LinuxMCE and a few light dimmer switches would be the perfect $200 package to get you started on this stuff, but no one tends to sell that in one kit.

Office supplies & the internet, part 2

So I put the question out there, what else can the internet disrupt?

It occurred to me that I've seen the other side of it as well - pick, pack & dispatch in a warehouse environment.

It's been a while since I worked in a warehouse, but I do remember a lot of the physical work that was involved - everything from driving a forklift, to wrapping by hand (pallet wrap is awesome, like a giant roll of gladwrap) or unloading a container.

So it's a little bit freakish to move from where things were 6 years ago - a forklift was a luxury in the south road warehouse I was in - to see the internet having rocked up and connected all of the warehouse packaging supplies you can possibly need to the end customer.

I used to see some things out there - pallet wrapping machines or friendlier pallet jacks - that I would have considered in the realm of warehousing science fiction six years ago.

I never got to use cool toys like an Orgapack strapping tool - on a good day, I got the non crappy stanley knife and packing tape dispenser for a few hours.

I don't think you could ever fully automate a warehouse, but the internet provides a heck of a big step towards it.
The stuff linked to above is only the cusp - supplies, for humans, and a few automated tools. What happens when you take the already ubiquitous warehousing logistical systems (there's a barcode on every carton, product, etc), throw in smartphone apps to replace handheld barcode scanners, add wifi and semi-automated forklifts or other machinery?

MIT has some of the answer. Check this out - a nerd with a smartphone and megaphone guides an autonomous forklift outdoors.

There's no premade routes, and the only thing special about the forklift are the after market addons.

It seems likely that we're going to end up with machines ordering their own supplies from each other, loading those supplies onto a B double or similar truck, driving themselves in a road train, unloading themselves, and humans stepping in for the "oops" moments or to do the finese work - things where it still remains too expensive to put an industrial robot on.

RFID tags and the existing barcodes mean that you don't have to have a perfectly organised system either - you just ping the pallet you want, or read the barcode on the packaging - the whole lot begins to self organise enough.

Push a little further and break down those barriers between backend and frontend systems, and it leads to only one conclusion: clicking that purchase link will give you command of a semi autonomous robot army within 5-10 years from now.

Neat.

Home automation and eating

I want a Unitech HT580 Wireless Barcode Scanner; but cheaper.

I want to holster the thing on the side of my cupboard or fridge; so when I'm loading up the fridge I can quickly tag barcoded products.

Most importantly; I want to be able to sync that with my computer to make an instant shopping list.

Failing all of this; I'll just have an internet fridge please